#targaryens

You opened the door and she walked in ahead of you like she owned the place, which was probably how she walked into every room she’d ever entered. The lobby was empty. You expected her to head for one of the apartment doors on the ground floor, to indicate somehow where she lived, but instead she sat down in the exact center of the lobby and began grooming her flank with the meticulous disdain of someone who had been terribly inconvenienced.

“Right,” you said. “Not helpful.”

You waited. The cat groomed. The elevator went up and came back down empty. Someone’s mail was sticking out of box 3B. The radiators clanked.

“Okay,” you said finally. “I have to go up. If you’re still here tomorrow, we’ll figure something out.”

She paused mid-lick to give you a look that said she had never been dismissed in her life and wasn’t about to start now.

She was still there when you got back from work the next day. Not in the lobby, outside again, on the same patch of concrete, curled into the exact same shape as if she’d never moved. The November dark had settled in thick and cold, her fur was beaded with the beginnings of frost, it made your chest clench.

“Absolutely not,” you told her, scooping her up before you could think better of it. She was heavier than she looked, a dense warm weight in your arms, and she made a sound like a creaking door as you carried her inside. “You’re coming upstairs. You’re eating something. We’re figuring out who you belong to.”

She didn’t struggle. She settled against your shoulder like she’d been doing this for a thousand years, her purr starting up low and rough like a motor that hadn’t been run in a while. Her claws kneaded gently into your coat, catching on the wool.

Your apartment was small. One bedroom, a galley kitchen, a living room that doubled as a dining room that doubled as an office. The cat surveyed it from the threshold with an expression you could only describe as politely appalled.

“It’s not much,” you said defensively, setting her down. “But it’s warm.”

She sniffed the baseboard. She investigated the corner where the radiator met the wall. She walked into the kitchen and sat down in front of the refrigerator with the clear expectation that it would open for her.

“What do you even eat?” you muttered, opening the fridge and scanning your meager contents. You didn’t have cat food. You didn’t have anything that seemed cat-appropriate. But you did have milk, and you did have a package of those cheap hot dogs from a supermarket.

“This is probably terrible for you,” you said, boiling one anyway and cutting it into small pieces, pouring a bowl of milk. “But you look like you’ve survived worse.”

She ate like she’d never seen food before. She drank the milk in laps. She looked up at you with a milk-white mustache on her gray muzzle and made a sound that resembled approval.

“You’re welcome,” you said, and sat down on the floor beside her.

You put up posters in the neighborhood: FOUND CAT, with a photo that didn’t do her justice and your phone number at the bottom. You posted in the local lost pet groups. You took her to a vet to check for a microchip, but there was nothing, which the vet found strange given the obvious quality of her collar.

“This is full-grain Italian leather,” the vet said, turning the collar over in her hands. “And the hardware is eighteen-karat gold plated. Someone spent a lot of money on this cat.”

“But no tag,” you said.

“But no tag,” the vet agreed. “Some people just assume their animals will never get out. Especially indoor cats. How’s she been eating?”

“Everything,” you said. “Anything. I gave her the crusts from my grilled cheese yesterday and she acted like it was a five-star meal.”

The vet laughed. “At her age, that’s a good sign. She’s healthy, just old. Very old. Probably fifteen, maybe older. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

So you did. You bought proper cat food eventually, the decent mid-range kind from the grocery store, and she ate it with the same enthusiasm she’d shown for the hot dogs and the milk and the leftover tuna salad. She slept on your bed every night. She sat in the window and watched the street below. You started calling her Lady, for lack of anything better, she ignored it with the same regal indifference she showed to everything else.

“You’re someone’s, aren’t you?” you said one evening, scratching under her chin while she purred like a broken generator. “Someone filthy rich.”

She closed her eyes and leaned into your hand, offering no answers.

You found the flyer on a Tuesday morning in early December, taped to a lamppost two blocks from your work office. The paper was thick and slightly glossy, the kind of paper that cost money, and the photo printed on it was clearly professional, the same gray cat, the same yellow-green eyes, but photographed against a dark background with studio lighting that made her look like a painting.

MISSING: VHAGAR, the flyer read. $7,000 REWARD FOR SAFE RETURN.

There was a phone number. That was all. No name. Just the cat’s name, the reward, and a number.

Vhagar. You tested the name in your mouth as you walked home, the flyer clutched in your cold hand. It sounded ancient. Mythological. Exactly the kind of name someone would give a cat who wore eighteen-karat gold on her collar and had professional photographs taken of her.

“Your name is Vhagar,” you told the cat when you got home. She was sprawled across your pillow in a pose of magnificent indolence, one paw draped over her eyes. At the sound of the name, her tail twitched. “That’s you, isn’t it? Vhagar.”

She lifted her head and looked at you, and for the first time since you’d found her, she let out a proper meow, short and declarative, as if to say finally, you’ve figured it out.

You sat down on the edge of your bed. Seven thousand dollars. That was two months of rent. That was the dental work you’d been putting off. That was breathing room, actual breathing room, the kind you hadn’t had since you’d moved to this city with its brutal rents and its casual cruelties and its complete indifference to whether you sank or swam.

But it wasn’t the money that made you pull out your phone. It was the way she’d been shivering on the concrete. The way someone had loved her enough to buy her that collar and take those photos and offer seven thousand dollars no questions asked, but not enough to put a tag on her. Not enough to think she might ever leave.

You typed the number into your phone before you could talk yourself out of it.

He answered on the second ring.

“Yes.”

Not hello. Not who is this. Just yes, flat and dry as old paper, a voice that expected the world to get to the point and not waste his time.

“Hi,” you said, suddenly aware that you hadn’t planned what to say. “I’m calling about the cat. The flyer. Vhagar. I think I have her.”

A pause. Just long enough to make you check if the call had dropped.

“Proof,” the voice said. “Send me proof.”

“What kind of...“

“A video that shows she’s alive and unharmed and actually in your possession.”

The demand was clipped, almost cold, and you felt a spike of irritation. You were doing him a favor. You could have kept the cat. You could have ignored the flyer entirely. But you swallowed your pride because seven thousand dollars was seven thousand dollars, and you’d already decided.

“Do you have Whatsapp or something with this number?” you asked, “I’ll send a video.”

He said yes and hung up without saying goodbye.

“Charming,” you muttered to the cat. Vhagar yawned, showing a pink mouth.

You recorded a thirty-second video of Vhagar on your bed, demonstrating that she was indeed alive and unharmed and being gently scratched behind the ears by someone who was not a cat thief. You sent it to the number. Thirty seconds later, your phone buzzed.

That’s her. Where can we meet?

You looked up the name attached to the number, of course. You weren’t stupid. You were about to meet a stranger from the internet to return a cat worth seven thousand dollars, and you wanted to know what you were walking into.

His name was Aemond Targaryen. The social media profile that came up was locked down tight: private, no profile picture, just the name and a cover photo of what looked like a dragon from some fantasy series. You scrolled anyway, finding nothing, until you thought to try LinkedIn.

His LinkedIn profile was not private.

The photo hit you first: a man in his twenties, maybe, with sharp cheekbones and jawlines like cut glass and hair so pale it was almost silver, pulled back from his face. He was wearing a dark suit and looking slightly to the left of the camera with an expression of controlled impatience, like he’d been forced to sit for the photograph and was counting the seconds until he could leave.

Below the photo was a wall of text. Degrees. Certifications. Projects. Internships at companies you’d seen on the news. A master’s degree. A bachelor’s from some private university in Oldtown. Fluent in four languages. Currently serving as Vice President of Strategic Operations at Targaryen Industries, which a quick search revealed to be a multinational conglomerate dealing in everything from real estate to renewable energy to defense contracting.

Old money. Very, very old money. The kind of money that had its own Wikipedia page and several unflattering investigative journalism pieces.

“You belong to him?” you asked Vhagar, who had climbed onto your laptop keyboard and was slowly erasing several paragraphs of an email you’d been drafting. “You belong to a billionaire’s son with a dragon fixation and cheekbones that could cut glass?”

Vhagar purred smugly and stepped on the delete key.

The meeting place was outside a high-rise in city center that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated poor people. All black glass and angular steel, a lobby visible through the ground-floor windows that contained more marble than the average museum. A doorman in a uniform stood at attention by the revolving doors.

Aemond Targaryen was waiting on the sidewalk.

He looked exactly like his LinkedIn photo and nothing like it at all. The photo had captured his bone structure but missed everything else: the way he held himself like a blade, the way his one visible eye tracked movement with unsettling precision, the way the left side of his face bore a long, pale scar that cut through his eyebrow and disappeared into his hairline. He was wearing a long black coat that probably cost as much as the cat’s reward, and he was looking at the cat carrier in your hands with an expression you couldn’t quite read.

“Vhagar,” he said, and his voice was different now, still dry, still clipped, but with something underneath it that you recognized. You’d made that sound yourself, sometimes, when you came home to find Lady waiting for you on the pillow. Relief, maybe. Or something close to it.

“She’s fine,” you said, setting the carrier down. “She’s been eating well. Sleeping a lot. She’s very…opinionated.”

He crouched down, actually crouched, in his thousand-dollar coat on the sidewalk, and opened the carrier door. Vhagar emerged with the slow dignity of a dowager queen descending from her carriage, and when she saw him, she made a sound that was almost a chirp. She headbutted his hand. She allowed him to pick her up, tucking her massive gray body against his chest like she’d been doing it all her life. Which, you supposed, she had.

“Where did you find her?” he asked, not looking at you. His attention was entirely on the cat, his long fingers stroking through her fur with a gentleness that seemed at odds with everything else about him.

“Outside my building. She was sleeping on the concrete.”

His jaw tightened. “How long?”

“About three weeks ago.”

He didn’t say anything. His hand stilled on Vhagar’s back. Then he pulled out his phone, tapped the screen a few times, and your own phone buzzed in your pocket.

“The reward,” he said. “Thank you for returning her.”

You checked your banking app. Seven thousand dollars, transferred and pending.

“Right,” you said. “Well. Take care of her. And maybe…put a tag on her collar next time.”

He looked at you then. Actually looked at you, his single visible eye, the other was covered by a swoop of hair but seemed to be a glass prosthetic, you weren’t sure, fixing on your face with an intensity that made you want to step backward. His eye was violet. A pale, impossible shade of purple that you had assumed was contacts until you were standing three feet away from him and could see the way the light hit it.

“She has never run away before,” he said, and it sounded almost like an accusation. As if you had somehow lured his ancient cat away from her penthouse and convinced her to live on hot dogs and milk.

“Well,” you said again, because his stare was unnerving, “she’s home now.”

He didn’t thank you again. He turned and walked into the building, Vhagar draped over his shoulder like a fur stole, the doorman holding the door for him with a murmured “Mr. Targaryen” that you caught on the wind.

You stood on the sidewalk for a moment longer, the December cold seeping through your coat, and then you went home.

You assumed that was the end of it. You had your money, he had his cat, and your worlds had brushed against each other for exactly long enough to complete a transaction. You unfollowed the lost pet groups. You washed Vhagar’s fur off your pillowcases. You tried to ignore the way your apartment felt quieter now, emptier, the absence of her rumbling purr leaving a gap in the dark that you hadn’t expected to miss.

Four days later, your phone buzzed with a message from an unsaved number.

What did you do to my cat?

You stared at the screen. You had not saved his number but you had not deleted the chat.

Sorry?, you typed back.

The response came immediately. Vhagar. She won’t eat. She refuses her food. What were you feeding her?

You tried to remember. Milk? Boiled sausages? Some tuna. The vet said she was healthy.

The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then your phone started ringing.

“Milk,” Aemond Targaryen said when you answered, his voice flat with barely contained outrage. “You fed a fifteen-year-old purebred Persian cat milk and boiled sausages?”

“She liked them,” you said defensively. “She ate them right up. What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” he said, “is that Vhagar’s normal diet consists of sustainably sourced Beluga caviar, free-range quail eggs, and a fish broth reduction that my family’s private chef prepares fresh every three days. She has never eaten processed meat in her life. She has certainly never consumed grocery store milk. And now she is sitting in front of her bowl looking at me as if I have personally betrayed her by serving her the same food she has happily eaten for fifteen years.”

You sat down on your bed. “She ate Beluga caviar? Like, the stuff that costs hundreds of dollars an ounce?”

“That’s not the point.”

“It kind of feels like the point.”

He made a sound of pure frustration, not quite a growl, not quite a sigh. “The point is that she’s refusing to eat. She’s refusing to eat and she’s refusing to come when I call her and she spent the entire morning glaring at me from the top of her custom-built cat tower, which, I might add, has three separate levels and a water feature.”

You tried to picture Vhagar, your Lady, who had slept on a spare pillow and eaten crusts off your plate, in a climate-controlled cat tower with a water feature. The image wouldn’t resolve.

“Have you tried…playing with her?” you asked.

“She doesn’t play,” Aemond said, as if you’d suggested she do her own taxes. “I throw her the toy mouse from Hermès and she demolishes it. That’s not playing. That’s destruction.”

“What about cardboard boxes?”

Silence. Long, profound silence, broken only by the faint sound of Vhagar yowling in the background.

“Cardboard boxes,” he repeated, his voice dangerously quiet.

“Yeah. You know. The things stuff gets shipped in? Cats love them. She went absolutely feral for the box my Amazon order came in. I put an old towel in it and she slept there for three days.”

“You want me,” Aemond Targaryen said, each word precise and clipped, “to give a member of my family, a cat who has been passed down through three generations, who has her own room in our estate, who has been photographed for Architectural Digest, a cardboard box?”

“I mean, it can’t hurt?”

Another long pause. The background yowling grew louder.

“This is absurd,” he said, and hung up.

The cardboard box apparently worked, because two days later he messaged you again. Not a call this time, a text, long and oddly formal, like a business proposal that had been written through gritted teeth.

Vhagar has been eating again. The box was…effective. However, she seems to have developed an attachment to your presence during her time away. She has been restless. The veterinarian suggested she may benefit from continued exposure to you as a source of environmental enrichment, which is a phrase I cannot believe I am typing. I am prepared to offer you a weekly retainer to visit and spend time with her. The compensation would be commensurate with your trouble.

Attached was a number that made your eyes water.

You read the message three times. You thought about the seven thousand dollars already sitting in your savings account. You thought about the way Vhagar had looked at you when you handed her over, that yellow-green stare that had seemed to say this isn’t over. You thought about Aemond Targaryen’s voice on the phone, dry and furious and somehow, despite everything, deeply concerned about a fifteen-year-old cat who missed you.

“This is insane,” you said to your empty apartment.

But you typed back: When do I start?

The first visit was awkward. Aemond’s apartment, if you could call a space that occupied nearly an entire floor of a high-rise an apartment, was a cathedral of minimalist wealth, all pale wood and pale stone and pale furniture that looked like it had never been sat on. Vhagar greeted you at the door with a yowl that seemed to say finally, you’ve arrived, and immediately led you to her custom cat tower, which was indeed three stories tall and featured a tiny chandelier.

“She’s been waiting by the door since this morning,” Aemond said. He was standing in the doorway of what appeared to be a library, dressed in a dark sweater that did nothing to soften the angles of his face. “I don’t understand why.”

“She’s a cat,” you said, sitting cross-legged on the heated marble floor while Vhagar climbed into your lap. “They’re mysterious.”

“She’s never sat in anyone’s lap but mine. And my mother’s. And occasionally my sister’s, though that ended badly.”

“What happened?”

“My sister is allergic. She found out when Vhagar sat on her face.”

You laughed. You couldn’t help it. Aemond was watching you with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t not one either, a slight softening around his mouth, a tilt to his head that made him look more like a person.

“Tea?” he asked, and it sounded almost reluctant, like the offer had escaped without his permission.

“Sure,” you said. “Tea would be great.”

Every Saturday, you took the train and spent the afternoon in Aemond Targaryen’s penthouse, ostensibly to entertain a cat who spent most of her time ignoring you in favor of her cardboard box. But Aemond was always there, hovering, appearing with cups of tea that grew progressively more elaborate, then plates of food that started as simple snacks and evolved into full meals.

“You said you’ve been eating bread and cheese for dinner,” he said one evening, setting a plate of something that looked like it belonged in a Michelin-starred restaurant on the coffee table in front of you. “That’s not nutritious.”

“I’m aware,” you said, but you ate it anyway, and it was the best thing you’d ever tasted.

He started finding reasons to extend your visits. A new toy for Vhagar to try. A documentary about Chartreux cats he thought you should watch. An outing to a cat café that he claimed was for research purposes but that mostly involved him standing in the corner looking deeply uncomfortable while cats climbed all over you.

“You’re not a cat person,” you observed, as a calico tried to scale his leg.

“I’m a Vhagar person,” he corrected, gently removing the calico and placing it on the floor. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“I’m beginning to think there might be,” he said, and then he turned away before you could ask what he meant.

Winter turned into spring. Your Saturday visits turned into Saturday visits plus occasional Wednesday dinners plus a standing invitation to a Sunday morning walk in a park, which Aemond claimed was for Vhagar’s benefit even though Vhagar never actually walked. He texted you articles about cat behavior and screenshots of Vhagar doing mundane things with captions like She sat in the box again. I don’t understand and The chef wants to know if she can have the sausage recipe.

“There’s no recipe,” you told him. “You boil them.”

“I told him that. He didn’t believe me.”

He started asking about your life. Your job. Your family. The things you cared about and the things you were afraid of and the things you wanted but had never let yourself reach for. He listened carefully, his pale eye fixed on your face, his sharp features softening in increments so small you almost didn’t notice them until one day you looked at him and realized you couldn’t remember why you’d ever found him cold.

Vhagar, for her part, seemed entirely unimpressed with the whole arrangement. She spent most of your visits asleep in her cardboard box, a new one now, because Aemond had his assistant procure them weekly, and only occasionally deigned to acknowledge your presence with a slow blink or a rumbling purr.

“She likes you,” Aemond said one evening, watching the cat knead her claws into an old towel.

“She tolerates me.”

“No.” He shook his head, his gaze still fixed on Vhagar. “She likes you. She’s particular. She doesn’t tolerate anyone she doesn’t like. She bit my brother once. Drew blood.”

“What did your brother do?”

“Breathed too loudly, I think.”

You laughed, Aemond glanced at you, and the expression on his face was something you’d never seen before, open, almost unguarded, his mouth curved into the ghost of a smile that transformed his severe features into startlingly beautiful.

“I’m glad you found her,” he said quietly. “The cat. I’m glad you found her.”

“Me too,” you said, and you weren’t entirely sure you were talking about the cat anymore.

Vhagar yawned, stretched, and went back to sleep, indifferent to everything but the warmth of the room and the comfort of her box.

You learned the layout of his penthouse the way you'd once learned the streets of your neighborhood, by heart, by instinct, by the slow accretion of familiarity that turns the unfamiliar into home.

You learned other things, too. That Aemond took his coffee black but would drink tea if you made it. That he read three books a month and annotated them in a spidery, elegant script. That he had a brother he never mentioned and a sister he mentioned only in passing and a mother who called him every Sunday at precisely eleven in the morning, which he answered without fail even if he was in the middle of a sentence. That his left eye, the one always covered, the one the scar bisected, was a wound he carried with him everywhere, a quiet grief he never spoke about directly but that shaped the way he moved through rooms, always keeping his right side to the door.

You learned about Alys by accident.

It was a Saturday in late March, the kind of day that pretends to be spring but still bites with winter's teeth, and you had arrived at the penthouse to find Aemond already pulling on his coat.

"Something's come up," he said, and his voice had that clipped quality it got when he was trying not to show frustration. "I have to go out of town. I'll be back Monday."

"Okay," you said, hanging your own coat on the hook he'd cleared for you weeks ago. "Do you want me to come back then, or..."

"No." He paused, his hands stilling on his scarf. "I was hoping you could stay with Vhagar. She gets…unsettled when I'm gone too long."

The last time he'd gone out of town, a business trip to Westerlands, three days, he'd called you twice a day with updates on Vhagar's mood and appetite. You hadn't minded. The money was good, and honestly, you'd grown fond of the old cat's cranky companionship.

"Sure," you said. "Where are you going?"

"Riverlands."

You waited for elaboration. None came.

"That's…specific."

He didn't meet your eyes. "Alys lives there. She doesn't like the city."

The name landed in your chest like a stone hurled. Alys. A woman's name, spoken with a familiarity that suggested it had been in his mouth many times before. You realized, with a strange hollow feeling, that he'd never mentioned her. Not once. In all those afternoons and evenings and Sunday walks, he'd never said a word about a girlfriend waiting for him in some small town hours away.

"I didn't know you were seeing someone," you said, and you were proud of how neutral your voice came out.

"It's complicated." He adjusted his scarf, still not looking at you. "We've been together for a while. She prefers her independence. I prefer…" He trailed off, a muscle jumping in his jaw. "It works."

"Right," you said. "Well. Go. Vhagar and I will be fine."

He finally looked at you then, something unreadable flickering across his features. "Thank you," he said, and left.

The penthouse felt different without him. Larger, certainly, all those minimalist rooms spreading out around you like a museum after hours. But also quieter in a way that felt less peaceful and more hollow. Vhagar seemed to sense it too; she followed you from room to room with more persistence than usual, her ragged meow punctuating the silence.

You did what you always did when you were catsitting: you sat on the heated floor with Vhagar in your lap, you watched your shows that Aemond pretended to disdain but always ended up commenting on, you ate from the refrigerator that his private chef kept stocked with things you couldn't pronounce. But your mind kept circling back to the name. Alys. The way he'd said it: flat, contained, like a fact he'd long since stopped examining.

On Sunday morning, the house phone rang at half past eleven. You let it ring. The answering machine beeped. A woman's voice which you assumed belonged to his mother, given the time, came through:

Aemond, I've spoken with the surgeon. He has an opening in April. Answer your phone.

Surgeon. April. Cold settled in your stomach.

When Aemond returned on Monday evening, he looked tired in a way that went beyond travel fatigue. His coat was rumpled, his hair escaping its usual careful restraint, his mouth set in a thin line that softened only slightly when Vhagar waddled over to greet him.

"Good trip?" you asked, gathering your things.

"Fine."

"How's Alys?"

The pause was a beat too long. "Fine."

"She must be something," you said carefully, "to keep you driving hours every time you have a free weekend."

He didn't take the bait. He just bent down to scratch Vhagar's chin, his expression shuttered. "She's very busy. Her practice takes up most of her time."

"Practice?"

"Traditional medicine. Herbalism. Holistic healing." He said it without irony, without skepticism, as if a woman who made her living selling tinctures and salves was the most natural thing in the world for a man with multiple advanced degrees and a vice presidency at a multinational corporation. "She's very skilled."

"I'm sure she is," you said, and left before you could say something you'd regret.

After that, you started noticing things.

The way Aemond's phone would buzz and he'd check it immediately, his expression flickering. The way he'd disappear into his study for hours, his voice a low murmur behind the closed door, emerging with that same tired look he'd worn coming back from Riverlands. The way he never texted Alys, or if he did, she never texted back, because every communication seemed to require a phone call, a ritual, a set-aside block of time he guarded fiercely.

"She doesn't like texting," he explained once, when you'd commented on the absurdity of him scheduling a two-hour call in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. "She finds it impersonal."

You thought about the string of unanswered texts on your own phone: friends from college, coworkers, the guy you'd gone on two dates with last month before he'd ghosted you, and wondered what it would be like to have someone so devoted to you that they'd carve out hours of their day just to hear your voice, while you couldn't be bothered to send a single line of text back.

"She must be very special," you said.

"She is." But he said it the way someone might recite a fact they'd memorized rather than a truth they felt in their bones.

The pieces assembled themselves slowly over weeks. Alys was older than him. Alys had a practice in a small town hours from the city. Alys refused to move, refused to visit, refused to integrate herself into his life in any way that required effort on her part. Alys gave him just enough to keep him coming back: a phone call, a weekend, a jar of something homemade that he'd place on his kitchen counter and stare at with an expression that made your chest ache.

He was too smart for this. That was the thing that got you, the thing that lodged under your ribs like a splinter. Aemond Targaryen, with his degrees and his four languages and his portfolio of accomplishments that would have been impressive for a man twice his age, was being strung along by someone who couldn't even be bothered to answer a text message. And he accepted it. He accepted it like it was all he deserved, like affection was a currency that could only be earned through suffering, like love was something you had to bleed for. You suspected he was taught to fish out flirts and gold diggers easily, but he hadn't been taught to examine his emotinal needs.

You saw it in the way he was with Vhagar, too. The cat tolerated him at best: she allowed his attention, accepted his offerings of caviar and quail eggs, but rarely sought him out the way she sought you. And yet he adored her. He planned his schedule around her meals. He commissioned custom furniture for her comfort. He spoke about her like she was a revered ancestor, which, in his family, she practically was.

And you. You, who had been hired as a catsitter and somehow become something more: a fixture in his home, a recipient of his cooking, his concern and his increasingly frequent glances that lingered just a moment too long. You, who he'd started looking at like you were precious, unexpected, something he hadn't known he was allowed to want.

The pattern was right there, written in the architecture of his life: Aemond Targaryen attached himself to people who barely tolerated him, and he called it love because he didn't know what else to call it.

The call came on a Thursday in late April.

"I need you to take Vhagar," Aemond said, his voice strained in a way you'd never heard before. "For several days. A week, maybe. Can you do that?"

You were at work, hunched over your desk with a spreadsheet blurring in front of your eyes. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I just...I have a procedure tomorrow, and I won't be able to care for her."

"Procedure?" Your stomach dropped. "What kind of procedure?"

A pause. You could hear him breathing, slow and controlled, the way he breathed when he was trying to keep himself together. "My eye. My mother found a surgeon. Another one. He thinks there's a chance."

The word another hit you like a punch. How many surgeries had there been? How many times had he gone under the knife, hoping for something that never came?

"I'll come to pick her up," you asnwered.

When you arrived at the penthouse, the doorman let you up without question, you were on the permanent access list now, a fact that still felt surreal every time you thought about it, and Aemond was waiting at the door.

He looked terrible.

His face was pale. His left eye, the one that was always covered, was visible now, hair finally brushed back. He was holding himself very still, very straight, the posture of someone who had learned long ago to carry pain without showing it.

"Before you say anything," he said, "I'm fine."

"You're having surgery."

"Another surgery. They're all the same." He stepped aside to let you in. "My mother is optimistic. She's always optimistic. The surgeon says there's a thirty percent chance of partial vision restoration, which means there's a seventy percent chance of nothing at all. I've made my peace with it. She hasn't."

You followed him into the living room, where Vhagar was sprawled in her cardboard box, a new one, large and rectangular, with a towel that had been arranged just so. She blinked at you slowly and didn't get up.

"When is it?" you asked.

"Tomorrow morning. Early. I have a car picking me up at five."

"You're going alone?"

The question seemed to confuse him. "Yes. Who else would go with me?"

You thought about Alys, somewhere in Riverlands, mixing her herbs and ignoring her phone. You thought about his mother, who had arranged the surgery but apparently not her schedule to be there for it. You thought about his siblings, who he never spoke about.

"I could go with you," you said, before you could stop yourself.

Surprise flickered across his face. "That's not necessary. You're here for Vhagar."

"Vhagar can come. She's a cat. She'll sleep through the whole thing."

"Vhagar in a hospital waiting room?"

"Fine, not in the waiting room. But I can still go. You shouldn't be alone."

He looked at you for a long moment, his good eye searching your face. "Why?" he asked finally. The question sounded genuine, as if he truly couldn't fathom why anyone would offer him comfort without being asked.

"Because that's what people do," you said. "They show up for each other."

"Ah." He turned away, busying himself with a stack of papers on the kitchen counter. "I appreciate the offer. Truly. But I've been doing this alone for a long time. I know how to handle my own treatment. Take Vhagar. I'll call you when I'm home."

You took Vhagar. You packed her into her carrier, which was, of course, custom-made leather with a monogrammed cushion, and you carried her down to the lobby and out to the street, and you stood there on the sidewalk for a full minute before you turned around and went back inside.

Aemond was still in the kitchen when you walked back in, Vhagar's carrier swinging from your hand. He looked up, his expression shifting from surprise to confusion to what that looked almost like relief before he shut it down.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm staying," you set the carrier down and opened it. Vhagar emerged with an indignant yowl and immediately headed for her cardboard box. "You shouldn't be alone, and I'm not letting you send me home just because you're too stubborn to admit you need help."

"The guest room is made up," he said, his voice was very quiet.

"Good. I'm ordering takeout. What do you want?"

"I have a list of approved restaurants in the drawer."

"Of course you do."

The surgery happened. You didn't go with him, he insisted, and you could tell it was important to him, this one last bastion of self-sufficiency, but you were there when he came back, pale and shaking and trying very hard to pretend he wasn't. The bandage was fresh, the swelling worse, and he walked through the door like a soldier returning from a battle he'd already known he would lose.

"Thirty percent," he said, lowering himself onto the couch carefully. "We'll know in a few weeks."

"The guest room is very nice," you said. "Also I made breakfast."

"You made breakfast?"

"Don't sound so surprised. I can cook some things. Eggs. Toast. Coffee. The basics."

He ate the eggs and the toast. He drank the coffee. Then he fell asleep on the couch, his head tilted back against the cushions, his bandaged eye turned toward the ceiling, and you covered him with a blanket and sat in the armchair across from him and watched the afternoon light move across his face.

Vhagar jumped onto his lap and settled there, a warm gray weight, he didn't wake up.

You stayed longer. Aemond was supposed to be resting, but resting turned out to mean pacing the penthouse at odd hours, staring out the windows, picking at the meals you ordered from his list of approved restaurants because apparently your culinary skills didn't extend past breakfast.

"I can make pasta," you offered on the third day, when he was eyeing a container of takeout Thai with the expression of someone who had eaten too much takeout Thai. "It won't be good pasta, but it'll be pasta."

"I don't trust your definition of pasta."

"It comes from a box. You boil it. You put sauce on it."

"Sauce from a jar?"

"Sauce from a jar," you confirmed.

He looked genuinely pained. "Order from the place on 57th. The one with the green awning. They know my order."

"Of course they do."

That evening, as you were eating pasta that had definitely never seen the inside of a jar, you decided to ask the question that had been sitting in your throat for days.

"Does Alys know you had surgery?"

Aemond's fork paused halfway to his mouth. "I mentioned it."

"You mentioned it."

"We talked last night. She's sending a jar of her salve. For the inflammation." He said it matter-of-factly, as if this were a perfectly normal response to your partner undergoing eye surgery. "She says it's very effective. Arnica, mostly, with some other herbs. She grows them herself."

"She's not coming to visit?"

He set his fork down. "She doesn't like the city. I told you."

"She doesn't like the city enough to visit her boyfriend after surgery?"

"It's not that simple."

"It seems pretty simple from where I'm sitting."

His jaw tightened, the familiar muscle jumping beneath his skin. "Alys is…she's not like other people. She has her own life, her own practice, her own way of doing things. I knew that when we started this. I accepted it."

"What does she accept about you?"

The question landed harder than you'd intended. His good eye fixed on your face, sharp and suddenly very violet, and for a moment you thought he was going to snap at you, tell you to leave, remind you that you were just the catsitter and this was none of your business.

Instead, he muttered, "I don't know."

You ate in silence after that. Vhagar, sensing the shift in the atmosphere, climbed onto the table and tried to stick her face in Aemond's pasta, and he let her.

At three in the morning, you found him in the living room, sitting in the dark with Vhagar in his lap and the lights of the city spread out below him like a carpet of stars. His bandage glowed white in the dimness, he didn't turn when you came in, just kept staring out the window with an expression that made something twist painfully in your chest.

"Can't sleep?" you asked, settling into the armchair beside him.

"The pain medication wears off around two. I'm used to it."

"That's not what I asked."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "I keep thinking about what you said. At dinner."

"I said a lot of things at dinner."

"About what she accepts." He turned to look at you, even in the darkness, even with half his face covered in gauze, the intensity of his gaze made it hard to breathe. "I don't think she accepts anything about me. I think she tolerates me. And I've spent so long thinking that was the same thing."

"It's not," you said.

"No. It's not." He looked back out the window. "Vhagar tolerates me. But she chose you. When she ran away, she found you, and she stayed. She doesn't do that for anyone."

"She stayed for the hot dogs."

"She stayed for you." His voice was barely above a whisper. "I think I understand why now."

Vhagar purred in his lap. The distance between your chair and the couch felt impossibly vast and impossibly small all at once, a gap that could be crossed in two steps or two years depending on whether either of you had the courage to move.

"She's not coming," Aemond said. "Alys. She's not coming, and I don't think I mind as much as I should."

"How do you feel about it?"

He was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough, scraped raw, the voice of someone admitting the truth against his will.

"Relieved," he said. "I feel relieved."

You sat in silence, keeping him company in the small hours of the morning until the sky began to pale and Vhagar yawned and stretched and demanded her breakfast.

Part 2: see here

a/n: Comment if you'd like to be added to this series' taglist.

The dressing room had been overtaken entirely. Your ladies-in-waiting moved around you, fanning bolts of fabric out on either side. Silks and velvets and things more delicate, colors ranging from a winter sea to a red so dark it bordered on black in certain lights. They rippled and shimmered as the women moved, catching the last warm gold of the evening sun that poured through the high chamber windows and turned everything briefly ethereal.

You yourself wore only a fitting garment, loose, unfinished, existing solely to give the seamstress her markers and to give you some vague impression of how the silhouette might look.

You had not expected the fabrics that were shown to you.

From silk to georgette, from heavy damask to something so fine and light it seemed to move of its own accord in the faintest touch. Every available cloth had been sourced, folded, hung, and presented for your consideration. The arrangement alone must have cost more than most lords spent on their entire household in a year.

You grimaced.

Both your husbands had an unseemly talent for excess when it came to you, a talent you had attempted to discourage. You had told them once, that it was entirely unnecessary, that you wanted for nothing, that they would do far better directing their generosity toward the smallfolk or the sept or truly anything that was not you.

You remembered very clearly how that conversation had gone.

Baelor had looked at you with that expression of his, that gave nothing away, a small smile settled at the corner of his mouth, his chin lifted. He had let you finish.

Then he had said: "For you, there is nothing too grand. You are Princess to this realm and Queen to be. You will be adorned as such."

You had looked to Maekar, hoping for an ally.

Maekar had looked back at you, then slowly crossed his arms across his chest, and considered the matter entirely settled, gave a single nod in agreement with everything Baelor had just said.

Not one word of his own.

The fabrics had arrived the following morning. More than before, if anything, as though the conversation had somehow encouraged them.

"Turn it," you said, and the ladies rotated a deep crimson satin. It caught the light differently on the second look, richer, almost mineral, like garnet pulled fresh from the earth. You tilted your head.

That one. Bold enough to honor them both. Red enough to make a statement without having to open your mouth.

You gave a single nod and a seamstress moved around you with tape and pins in hand. Hem, shoulders, the length of your arm.

Then she reached your middle.

She paused.

Her brow furrowed and she measured again. Carefully.

"Is something the matter?"

She startled, nearly dropping a few pins from her hand. "N-No, Your Grace. I apologize." Her eyes dropped immediately to her work but not before they had flickered, just once, to the soft curve of your belly.

You watched her in the mirror.

"I am asking you to be honest with me."

The seamstress swallowed.

"Yes, Your Grace. I will need to make some readjustments around your middle. I deeply apologize."

The room did not freeze so much as empty. The murmuring of your ladies trailing off into nothing, the rustle of fabric going still. Something small and quiet inside your chest simply stopped.

Your hands moved before you thought to stop them, settling over the curve of your belly. The way you might cover something you did not want seen.

It was such a small thing. Such an ordinary, professional observation from a woman simply doing her work. She had not been cruel. She had not even been unkind. And yet the words had found something in you that more than twenty years of marriage had left entirely unguarded because your husbands had never given you reason to guard it.

Not once.

Not in the dark, when there was nothing between you and their hands, when Baelor's mouth traced your skin and Maekar's grip left marks he never apologized for.

Not in passing, in the ordinary daylight hours of a shared life. Not in any of the thousand small moments that might have invited cruelty, had they been different men.

In more than twenty years, through six children and all the ways your body had changed and shifted and marked itself with the evidence of that, not once had either of them made you feel that any part of you required an apology, so you had simply never thought about it.

And yet, as if the gods had decided that women had not suffered quite enough, that small passing professional assessment had woken something in you that had apparently been sleeping very lightly. It was a foolish thought. You had never had reason to doubt yourself. Until someone else voiced it.

"Very well," you said.

Afterwards, when the seamstress had retreated to a smaller room next door to make her adjustments, you let your ladies press jewels into your palm for approximately thirty seconds before you raised your hand.

"Leave me."

They inclined their heads and left without a word. The door clicked shut behind them.

You stood before the mirror alone.

Slowly, you reached for the knot of the garment and let it fall.

It had been some time since you had truly looked at yourself.

Your breasts were softer than they had once been, heavier, sitting lower than you remembered. Your nipples darker than they had been in your girlhood. Your belly was soft too and mapped, hip to navel, with the pale silver traces of scars that had long since faded. But those were not the only marks.

There, low on your abdomen still faint after all these years, the long curved scar from Valarr. Your first birth, the hardest of them all. Three days of labor and a maester who had fought to keep you both in the world and won, barely.

Higher, at your left hip, the tear from Aerion. Too fast, too early, the kind of birth that happened before anyone was ready.

And then there, low, just above your pubic mound, Aegon's mark. The stubbornest of all of them, and the most intimate in its placement, a thin line that had refused to silver eight years. Still faintly pink.

Eight years since Aegon. Eight years since the last of them had come into the world red-faced and angry and perfect.

Six children. Six times your body had opened itself and endured and kept going and you had never, not once, allowed yourself to think of it as anything other than duty. What mothers did. What wives did. What was simply expected and therefore required no acknowledgment.

Standing here now, alone in the quiet of your chamber, you were not sure whether to feel proud of it or grieve it.

Perhaps both. Perhaps that was the only honest answer.

You thought of yourself twenty years ago. The smoothness of that skin. The absence of scars. The body that had not yet learned what it would be asked to do, or what it would cost.

You wondered, sometimes, if that girl would even recognize you.

Your eyes moved over your reflection again, searching for something.

And then, the questions came.

Did your husbands truly see this and feel what they claimed to feel?

Was it genuine?

Or was this simply duty to them?

The thought arrived like poison. Maybe they could do it because of someone else. A younger woman living in their minds. Softer skin behind closed eyes when their hands were on yours. Maybe that was how they managed it. Maybe that was the only way they could.

Your mind fed you the thought and then fed you more and you stood there and let it.

Your proudness. Your stubbornness. Twenty years of certainty, all of it quietly dismantled by nothing more than your own reflection.

You pressed your lips together.

You could not make it make sense. The body in the mirror and the hunger in their eyes could not possibly be looking at the same thing.

The shame followed.

It washed over you in a wave you were not prepared for. The doubt, the grief for that girl in the mirror who no longer existed, the deep humiliation of standing in your own skin and finding it wanting.

You had faced childbed fever. You had faced loss. You had sat at the bedsides of sick children and held yourself together by sheer will alone.

You had not expected this to be the thing that broke through.

You bent and retrieved the garment from the floor. Pulled it around your shoulders. Hugged it close with both arms wrapped tight across your middle and held yourself.

And then, quietly, you wept.

The doors to the great hall were open, with warm light and noise spilling into the corridor. You paused there for a moment, just long enough to straighten your shoulders, lift your chin, and make yourself look composed.

Your corset was tightly laced beneath your gown, shaping your figure into something polished and proper. It didn’t quite match what you had seen in the mirror an hour ago. Still, you were grateful for it, even if that feeling didn’t sit entirely right with everything else on your mind tonight.

Then the herald's voice rang out, cutting through the noise of the hall.

"Her Royal Highness, Princess of the Seven Kingdoms. Wife to Prince Baelor and Prince Maekar of House Targaryen. Mother to six princes of the realm."

The hall shifted. People turned to look. Voices grew quieter, one table at a time, starting near the doors and spreading across the hall.

You walked in.

The great hall had been transformed. Every long table draped in cloth of gold and deep Targaryen crimson, candles burning in their hundreds along the walls and suspended in iron chandeliers above, casting everything in warm amber light that caught the jewels of the assembled lords and ladies. Fresh flowers had been brought in from the glass gardens, white and red arranged in various displays between the candelabras, and the smell of them mingled with roasting meat and spiced wine made it clear this was a celebration.

The red gown was beautiful. You knew it was beautiful and yet all you felt was the weight of being looked at. Lords inclining their heads as your eyes passed over them. Ladies assessing you, smiles that may or may not have reached their eyes. You smiled back at all of them and felt beneath the corset uncomfortable in your own skin.

You breathed in.

And then, a loud shout.

"Mother!"

Aegon had spotted you from across the room, the conversation with Aemon abandoned mid-sentence.

He was already moving, pushing through the crowd with little care for manners. Two lords had to step quickly aside, and a lady grabbed her wine cup before he knocked into her.

He hit you around the middle.

Both arms thrown around you, his face pressing directly into the soft of your belly, his small hands gripping your sides with a force that was frankly surprising for someone his size. He held on with the complete certainty of a boy who had never once questioned whether he was wanted.

You stiffened and felt the grimace cross your face before you had any hope of stopping it. You were grateful that he was buried too far into you to see it.

"My sweetling." You kept your voice warm and drew him back gently, turning him by the shoulders to face you. "Look at you."

He wore an apricot silk doublet that shimmered through various shades of gold as he moved, with deep red and black visible beneath. Dornish in its cut, but threaded with elements of House Targaryen and there, if you looked closely, traces of your own house woven in.

Over his right breast hung a three-headed dragon in silver. Queen Myriah's doing, without question.

His hair had been dressed back from his face.

It would last another hour at most and you both knew it.

"How are you enjoying the festivities?" you asked, smoothing his collar with both hands.

Aegon's expression changed drastically. "Not much. The lords keep trying to talk to me about things I do not care about and Lord Bracken's son stepped on my foot and did not even apologize."

"Did he."

"Deliberately, I think."

"I am certain it was an accident."

"Aemon says I should not hit him back because we are at grandsire's feast and it would be embarrassing." He paused. "Aemon is probably right."

"Aemon is absolutely right."

"I know." He sighed, loudly. "I would still rather be outside."

"If it would make you feel better," you said, leaning slightly toward him and keeping your voice low, "I would rather be outside too."

His face split into a grin and you smiled back at him before you could help yourself. Your sweet boy.

A beat of comfortable silence settled between you, warm and easy and then...

He went still.

The grin faded, replaced by something that had no business being on the face of a boy his age. He looked up at you and the sheer focus of it caught you off guard, those violet eyes of his moving over your face with careful attention that made the back of your neck prickle.

You had the sudden and very uncomfortable feeling of being read.

"Are you alright?"

You held his gaze for a moment.

He looked back at you and waited, with a patience that was entirely Baelor's and a stubbornness that was entirely Maekar's, and the combination of the two on that small face was almost enough to undo you completely.

Gods. You had really gone and birthed sons with the observational instincts of their fathers.

"I am perfectly well, thank you my sweet." The words came out smooth and easy, "Now go back to your brother."

Aegon's face arranged itself into a scowl. He held it for a moment, clearly weighing his options, and then turned and scurried back toward Aemon.

He looked back at you once.

Over his shoulder, those too-sharp eyes finding your face across the hall with an ease that should not have been possible at his age.

You turned your attention to the room instead and searched the rest of the hall for your sons.

Aerion was not difficult to find. He stood at the center of a small cluster of young noble ladies, all of them flushed and giggling, their eyes moving over him freely and without shame.

He was enjoying every moment of it, you could tell by the set of his shoulders, the easy smile, the way he leaned slightly toward whoever was speaking. He wore House Targaryen colors, bold black with red accents, but underneath, if you looked closely, faint lines of apricot silk caught the light.

Matarys stood not far from his brother, which was where Matarys tended to be, close enough to keep an eye on things, far enough to want no part in them. He was talking to a group of men, several of them knights by the look of them, all wearing very serious expressions. Matarys fit right in amongst them. The difference between him and Aerion not twenty feet away was so completely typical of them both that you felt a laugh leave you.

Your eyes moved on.

To the right, beside the Iron Throne, King Daeron stood with Queen Myriah, talking to a group from Tyrosh. Beside them stood Kiera and Valarr nearby, doing a poor job of pretending he had not noticed her. You watched him steal a glance at her. Watched her notice. Watched them both look away in opposite directions like two people with absolutely nothing to hide.

You pressed your lips together.

It was indeed a very good match.

Further along the hall your second eldest Daeron stood with a young lord from House Lannister.

It was a fine atmosphere. Warm and loud and glittering with everything a celebration ought to be.

And yet your eyes, traitorously, had begun to move.

The hall was full of lords, naturally. Men of every age and station filling the long tables, deep in the serious business of being seen and seeing others. But between them, beside them, were their daughters. Their sisters. Young noble ladies in gowns of every color, their skin smooth, their laughter easy, their figures untouched by the demands of duty and childbirth and years.

They moved through the hall like light through glass, effortless, bright, drawing the eye without trying.

You watched them and felt something ugly stir in the pit of your stomach.

It was shameless, the thought that followed. You knew it was shameless even as it took shape. But there it was regardless, rising up from that same dark place where the doubt had been living all evening.

Your husbands were men. Vital, powerful, striking men who commanded every room they entered. And these girls were everywhere tonight, glowing with youth that required no effort other than a beautiful gown.

What man, given the choice, would stop himself. After all even your husbands...

You stopped the thought before it finished itself.

And yet the shame sat in you like a stone at the bottom of a river and your feet did not want to carry you further into the room.

You were still standing there, caught between duty and the desire to simply not, when a hand settled at your side.

Warm. Familiar. Fingers curling against your hip like they had every right to be there . A private hello in the middle of a very public room. It pressed, just slightly, into the softness there.

You pulled away before you had consciously decided to and turned.

Baelor.

He stood close and his head dipped slightly toward your ear, his voice dropping to something low and meant only for you.

"My love. You look radiant tonight."

That voice. Even now, after everything, after all the years, the low warm of it settled deep in your belly, coiling somewhere intimate and inconvenient, and you had no control over it whatsoever.

It died as quickly as it came.

You stepped back, just slightly.

"Husband." You kept your voice light and easy. "How are you enjoying the festivities?"

There it was, that flutter in his eyes. Brief, barely there. His gaze moved over you, top to bottom and back again, slow and thorough.

You watched him pull himself together and so you looked at him properly for the first time this evening.

He was, by any honest accounting, unfairly handsome for a man his age.

His brown hair had grown into something richer with the years, peppered through with grey that caught the candlelight like silver thread, slightly longer on top and curling at the ends.

His mismatched eyes were warm tonight, full of that quiet command that he carried as naturally as other men carried swords. His beard was trimmed close and neat, framing the line of his jaw.

He was broad through the shoulder, straight-backed, carrying himself with the kind of authority that could not be taught and could not be faked.

He wore a long doublet of black so deep it drank the light, and yet the fabric itself gave off something, a deep red hue that surfaced depending on how he moved, like embers beneath coal. It fit him extraordinarily well.

He caught you staring and smiled.

It was, unfortunately, an extremely handsome smile.

And then your eyes moved past him, just for a moment and your stomach dropped.

They were looking at him.

Several of the young noble ladies you had noted earlier had their eyes fixed on your husband with an attention that could not be mistaken for anything other than exactly what it was, hungry and shameless.

The look of women who saw something they wanted and had not yet decided against reaching for it. One, in a pale gold gown, had her lips slightly parted, her gaze dragging over Baelor with a boldness that made your jaw tighten. Another leaned toward her companion and murmured something in her ear, her eyes never leaving his profile. A third young, dark haired beautiful woman was not even attempting subtlety. She was simply staring, her wine cup forgotten in her hand. She was fucking him with her eyes and she did not care who knew it.

And when they finally noticed you looking, they did not even have the decency to look ashamed. Just a small glance aside. A little smile shared between them. And then, one of them reached up and pulled her neckline just low enough to make herself perfectly clear.

The jealousy that hit you was hot and ugly and you did not care even slightly that it was, because you were fairly certain that if you opened your mouth right now not a single dignified thing would come out of it.

You turned back to your husband.

He was still looking only at you.

Which somehow made it worse.

"I am enjoying myself greatly." His voice dropped just low enough that it was only for you. "Though at present it is you I am most enjoying looking at."

You scoffed. It came out before you could dress it in something more appropriate, sharp and dismissive and you watched his smile falter at the edges.

And then something rose up in you that you had no name for and no warning of, a hot, wordless anger that had nothing reasonable at its root. You were angry at the way he looked at you. Angry at the sincerity of it. Angry, most of all, because you wanted to believe it and could not, and that felt like his fault even though it wasn't, and you knew it wasn't, and that made you angrier still.

"Must you always stand so close to me."

It came out sharper than you intended and you did not apologize for it.

Baelor stilled.

"My love—"

"I simply need room to breathe." You kept your chin up. Kept your voice even. "That is all."

He looked at you for a moment with those mismatched eyes of his, steady and careful, just observing.

It was, you thought, extremely irritating.

"Of course." He said it quietly, graciously and inclined his head at you. Not a single trace of reproach in it.

That somehow made it worse.

You turned and walked away from him, your chin high and your chest tight, and did not look back.

You moved through the hall with your head high, nodding once to Lord Tully as you passed, exchanging a small smile with one of the Tyrell women.

You lifted a goblet of wine from a passing servant's tray without breaking stride and by the time you reached the grand table and settled into your seat, you felt utterly terrible for the way you snapped at Baelor. Yet the small irrational part of you that had wanted a reaction, that had wanted to crack that composure of his just slightly, sat in your chest alongside the guilt and did not apologize for itself.

A servant appeared at your elbow almost immediately, setting down a small board arranged with care. Aged cheese, dark bread, sliced cold meat fanned out.

And in the center, nestled amongst it all—

A sugar-filled date.

You stared at it.

It was your favorite. Had been your favorite for as long as you could remember, and someone in this kitchen had thought of that tonight and the small thoughtfulness of it should have moved you and instead it did the opposite entirely. Your eyes dropped to your belly, hidden and shaped and smoothed beneath the crimson gown, and something unreasonable moved through you.

You picked the date up and set it on the plate beside you without eating it.

You looked at the rest of the food, decided against all of it, and lifted your eyes to the hall instead.

Across the room, Matarys, Aerion and Daeron had found each other in the far corner, three goblets of wine between them, heads bent together over something that had all three of them laughing, their cheeks flushed rosy with warmth and wine and each other's company. You watched them for a moment longer than you meant to. Your boys. Grown and broad-shouldered and loud with laughter and so thoroughly themselves that something in your chest pulled tight and sweet at the sight of them.

Aemon and Aegon had migrated toward a group of children from the Dornish houses, deep in what appeared to be a very serious game of hands.

You smiled to yourself.

Further down the hall you caught sight of Valarr and Kiera, half hidden from the rest of the room near the far wall. Valarr was speaking low, his whole attention on her face, and Kiera's cheeks were pink and she was leaning closer without seeming to realize she was doing it.

You looked away. That was theirs. It did not need an audience.

You were still watching the hall with your wine when a figure approached and stopped at the edge of your table. Young. Well dressed. A face you placed after a moment of thought, Lord Arryn's son. Ronnel.

He inclined his head to you.

"May I, Your Grace?" He gestured to the empty seat beside you.

You nodded.

He sat, settled himself, and turned to you with the expression of someone who had been working up to this approach for some time.

"It is a fine night tonight, Your Grace."

"It is indeed. How are you enjoying yourself, Lord Arryn?"

He smiled and opened his mouth to answer.

And then his eyes dropped to the small plate beside you, to the date sitting there untouched, and without a word he reached over and picked it up. Turned it between his fingers.

You watched his hand.

Something about it struck you as both very young and very male, and you said nothing, only watched and waited to see what he would do with it.

He set the date down and turned to you properly.

"I am enjoying myself greatly, Your Grace. Though I confess the company at my table pales considerably compared to the company I find here."

"You are kind, Lord Arryn."

"I am honest." He said it with a grin, his eyes moved over you in a way that was not subtle.

"My father speaks very highly of your family. Of you especially."

"Does he."

"He says there is no woman in the Seven Kingdoms who has given more to the realm than you have." He leaned forward slightly, his elbow finding the table, closing the distance between you. "Six sons, Your Grace. Six princes. The realm owes you a great debt."

And there it was.

Said with complete sincerity. Said as a compliment, wrapped in genuine admiration, delivered with that uncomplicated smile.

Six sons. As though that was the whole of you. As though the most remarkable thing about you was the number of times your body had successfully produced an heir.

You kept your smile exactly where it was.

"The realm is very generous in its accounting," you said pleasantly.

He laughed and his eyes dropped briefly, just briefly, to the neckline of your gown before finding your face again.

"If I may say, Your Grace." His voice dropped just slightly. "The realm rather undersells you."

"Is that so."

"Considerably." He held your gaze and did not look away, his grin shifting into something a little slower, a little more sure of itself.

"I find myself wondering how it is that two princes have managed to keep you entirely to themselves all these years without the rest of us losing our minds over it."

You reached over, picked up the date from the plate where he had set it, and placed it back in the center of your board with a small smile.

"You are very bold for a man drinking my husband's wine, Lord Arryn."

His grin widened. "Is that a complaint, Your Grace?"

"That," you said pleasantly, lifting your own goblet, "is an observation."

He laughed at that and you found yourself, despite everything, almost enjoying it.

"Then I shall take it as an invitation," he said.

"You may take it however you like, Lord Arryn. It changes nothing."

He tilted his head, still smiling, studying you. "You are not what I expected, Your Grace."

"And what did you expect?"

"Something more distant. More formal." His eyes moved over your face. "You are funnier than I expected. And..." He stopped himself.

"Go on," you said.

He looked at you steadily. "More beautiful than I expected."

The words landed warm and you were just allowing yourself to feel something good for the first time this entire evening when a voice cut through from somewhere behind your left shoulder.

"Bold of him, is it not." Light. Amused. Meant for whoever stood beside her.

"She must be grateful for the attention." A second voice, lower, with a little laugh underneath it. "Women her age do not get it so freely anymore. Not when there are younger options in the room."

A pause.

"I suppose when you have done your duty and given your husbands their heirs there is nothing left but to take compliments where you can find them."

The warmth of the moment died so completely and so quickly it was as though it had never been there at all.

You set your goblet down.

Your smile did not move. Not even slightly. Twenty years had made you very good at that.

Ronnel had heard it too, you could tell by the slight shift in his expression, the flicker of discomfort that crossed his face before he smoothed it over. To his credit he opened his mouth as though he intended to say something.

"It has been a pleasure, Lord Arryn," you said pleasantly, before he could.

"The pleasure was mine, Your Grace." He said it quietly.

He left.

You sat very still.

Around you the feast continued, the laughter, the clinking of goblets, the hundred conversations of half the realm enjoying themselves. None of it had stopped. None of it had even paused. The world had kept moving through the thirty seconds it had taken for two women behind you to dismantle what little was left of the evening and it had not noticed and it did not care.

You reached for your wine.

A shadow fell across the table and the chair beside you scraped back loudly against the stone floor and Maekar dropped into the seat that Lord Arryn had left not two minutes ago. The chair groaned under him. He stretched one leg out, reached across youand grabbed a handful of nuts from the bowl near your elbow, and sat back.

Behind you, the two women stopped talking.

You took a sip of your wine.

"This night is far too long," Maekar said, to no one and put the nuts in his mouth.

You said nothing.

He chewed. Looked out across the hall with that assessing gaze of his, taking stock of the room. You kept your eyes forward and your wine in your hand and waited for whatever.

Then you felt it.

His gaze moving from the hall, to you.

"You are not eating."

"I am aware of what I am and am not doing, thank you."

He looked at the untouched plate. Then at you. "Eat something."

"I am not hungry."

"You have not eaten anything."

"Maekar, I am not hungry."

He reached over, picked up the date from the center of your board beside and held it out.

You stared at it.

"No."

He kept holding it out.

"I said no."

He put it down directly in front of you and reached for the nuts again.

You placed the date to the side.

"Who was he," he said.

"Lord Arryn's son. He was being polite."

"He was not being polite."

"We were having a perfectly pleasant conversation—"

"I know what I saw."

"Then you saw a young lord making conversation with a princess at a feast, which is entirely unremarkable and none of your concern."

Something shifted in his jaw. "It becomes my concern when a lord sits that close to my wife."

"Oh." The laugh that came out of you was not a kind one. "Oh, so that is your concern. A lord sitting too close." You kept your voice low but there was nothing soft in it. "How interesting that you find that so troubling."

He frowned. "What is that supposed to mean."

"It means," You turned to face him fully, your hands flat on the table. "That every woman in this hall has been looking at you since the moment you walked in like they want to pull you out of that doublet and not one of them has been subtle about it." You held his gaze. "And I did not see you rushing across the room about that."

He stared at you.

"That is completely different."

"Is it."

"Yes." Flat. Certain. "Because I am not interested in them."

"And yet there they are." You gestured vaguely behind him. "Looking. And here you are, saying nothing, doing nothing, and the moment one man speaks to me for five minutes—"

"He was not just speaking to you—"

"He was a boy with too much wine, Maekar, he was harmless—"

"I did not say he was not harmless, I said he was sitting too close to my wife and I did not like it." His voice had dropped to something very quiet now, which with Maekar was always more dangerous than volume.

"Those are not the same thing."

"Then what are you saying." You matched his tone.

"Because from where I am sitting it looks very much like you trust every woman in this room with your attention but you do not trust me with a conversation."

"That is not what this is." His jaw worked.

"Then tell me what it is."

He looked at you. "I told you. He was too close."

"He was making conversation."

"He was looking at you like—" He stopped again.

"Like what." You lifted your chin.

"Like he wanted you." He said it simply, no heat in it, just fact. "And I did not like it."

"You did not like it." You stared at him. "You did not like another man finding your wife attractive."

"I did not like another man thinking he had any right to—"

"But they do." You gestured behind him again, wider this time. "All of them. Every woman who has been staring at you and Baelor all evening, undressing you both with their eyes, whispering to each other—" Your voice caught slightly. You pushed through it.

"They think they have every right. And no one says a word about that. No one storms across the room about that. But one man sits beside me and suddenly—"

"You are my wife."

"So are you mine." You said it hard and fast and meant every syllable of it.

"That works both ways Maekar."

Silence.

He looked at you for a long moment and something moved behind his eyes.

"Something is wrong," he said quietly.

"Nothing is wrong."

"You have been acting strange since the moment you walked into this hall. This morning you were completely different." His eyes did not move from your face. "What happened."

You felt it then, that wall you had been holding up all evening, brick by brick begin to crack right down the middle.

You leaned in close. Close enough that no one around you could hear a single word of what was about to come out of your mouth.

"You want to know what happened." Your voice was low and shaking at the edges and you did not care.

"I stood in front of a mirror tonight and I looked at myself."

The ugliness rose up through your chest hot and unstoppable.

"I looked at my breasts, the way they hang now, the way they never sat the way they used to. I looked at my belly, soft and scarred from carrying six children. I looked at the marks on my hips, on my stomach—" Your jaw tightened. "All of it. Every part of me that used to be something else before I spent more than twenty years giving this family everything my body had to give."

His expression had gone completely still.

"And then I walked into this hall." Your voice dropped lower. "And I watched every young, smooth, untouched woman in this room look at my husbands like they were something worth having." Your throat burned.

"And I thought, why would they not look back. Why would you not. Why would either of you not look back and think, yes. That. Instead of — " You gestured at yourself. All of yourself. "This."

He said nothing.

You felt the tears brimming and you were on your feet before a single one of them could fall, because you would not. Not here.

You did not look at Maekar's face. You could not.

"I need air." Your voice came out wrecked and quiet and you did not wait for his answer. "Do not follow me."

You turned and walked and then you were moving faster than was dignified and you did not care even slightly. The hall blurred at the edges and from the corner of your eye you caught your sons.

Matarys, straightening. Aerion, frowning. Daeron going still mid conversation. Their faces all wearing different versions of the same expression and you looked away from all of them because if you looked at them properly right now you would fall apart completely.

A pair of Kingsguard fell into step behind you.

You turned and looked at them with an expression that stopped them where they stood. They did not follow.

You pushed through the side door and into the night and then you were running, your gown gathered in both fists, down the stone path and past the roses and the fountain and through the dark until the lemon trees rose up around you and the noise of the feast was nothing but a distant murmur.

You found a bench and sat down hard.

And you cried the way you had been holding back all evening, with your whole chest, bent forward, both hands pressed over your belly and your face crumpling and the tears falling freely into the dark with no one to see them and nothing left to hold them back.

As you sobbed you caught movement from the corner of your eye and looked up.

The lemon trees had been decorated, you had not noticed in your rush to get here, but now, with your eyes adjusting and the tears clearing slightly, you saw them properly.

Small glass Dornish suns hung from the branches, each one cradling a tiny candle that threw warm gold light across the leaves in shifting patterns.

And amongst them, tied with thin ribbon, barely larger than a child's palm,

Paintings.

You stood slowly and reached for the nearest one, your fingers closing around it carefully.

It was rough in the way of a child's work, uneven lines, colors slightly outside their edges but purposeful.

A dragon, painted in careful strokes of black and red, and beneath it a small cluster of figures. A family.

You reached for the second one.

Another dragon. Another family. Slightly different hand, Aemon's, you thought, more careful than his brother's, the lines steadier.

You stood beneath the lemon trees in the dark with a painting in each hand and felt something move through your chest.

"It was Egg's idea."

You startled slightly, turning. From the dark between the trees Baelor emerged, the soft light of the glass ornaments catching him in warm gold as he moved toward you.

"He came to me a few days ago and asked if there was something that could be done to make the gardens more beautiful for the feast." The corner of his mouth moved. "I assumed he meant flowers. More candles perhaps." He looked at the portraits in your hands. "And then he and Aemon appeared at my solar with those, and I understood."

You looked down at them again. The small uneven dragons. The little painted families beneath them.

Something in your chest pulled so tight it almost hurt.

"He wanted to show you himself, later in the evening." Baelor's voice was gentle. "It seems you found them first."

"Of course he did this." Your voice came out rough and you laughed despite yourself, small and watery.

Baelor moved closer. Not close enough to crowd you and reached into his pocket and pulled a cloth, holding it out to you without a word.

You took it. Pressed it under your eyes and took a deep breath.

"How long have you been out here," you asked quietly.

"Long enough."

"And him?" You nodded toward the far end of the garden where a second figure stood in the dark, keeping his distance. Still as a post. Watching.

Baelor glanced briefly over his shoulder.

"He followed you the moment you left the hall." He turned back to you. "I asked him to give you a moment."

You huffed at that and you felt yourself smiling.

You looked at Baelor eyes, and they were warm and full of concern.

You sat down at the bench and he waited and you nodded and he sat down next to you.

You still clutched the small portaits in your hand.

"Do you want to tell me," Baelor said, "what happened tonight."

You looked down at the paintings in your hands.

At the small painted dragons. The small painted families.

"It was a moment of weakness." You folded your fingers around the paintings carefully, not looking at him. "Do not concern yourself with me Baelor. You have far more important business to attend to tonight."

"Look at me."

You looked at him.

That careful composed layer of him entirely gone, stripped back to something underneath that he did not show many people and had always shown you freely.

He reached out and took your free hand. Slowly. Giving you every opportunity to pull away. And then he placed it flat against his chest, over his heart, and held it there with both of his.

"I am Prince of this realm," he said quietly. "Lord Hand to the King. Father to six sons." His eyes did not leave yours. "But I am your husband before any of it. We both are. And our duty to you extends far beyond anything our titles could put a name to." His hand pressed yours more firmly against his chest. "You are not a concern, you are not an obligation. You are our soul. Everything we are begins and ends with you."

Your lip trembled.

You pressed it together hard and it trembled anyway and you hated it and could not stop it.

Then you heard footsteps on the stone path.

Maekar stepped into the warm light of the glass ornaments and stopped just behind Baelor's shoulder, his eyes moving over your face. But his jaw was tight and something in his expression was raw in a way you had not seen from him in a very long time.

"My brother is right." His voice came out lower than usual. Rougher at the edges.

He stepped closer and looked at you the way he rarely let himself look at you in front of anyone.

"You are it." He said it low and certain. "You have always been it. For both of us. There is no version of any of this," he gestured between the three of them, "that exists without you at the very center of it." His throat moved. "There has only ever been you. There will only ever be you."

He held your gaze for a moment longer. Then he glanced briefly at Baelor and then he looked back at you.

And then Maekar, went to his knees in front of you.

The breath left your body.

Your face burned. Something low in your belly pulled tight and your thighs pressed together and you stared down at him with your heart hammering against your ribs.

He took both of your hands in his. His were large and rough and warm and they swallowed yours completely.

"What you said to me in that hall," He stopped. Started again. "The way you spoke about yourself. What you see when you look at yourself." His jaw tightened.

"It broke something in me, because it means we have failed you. Somewhere in all these years, we have failed you and I—" His voice dropped to almost nothing.

"I am not a man who fails at things he cares about. I do not know how to be that man. The thought that you have been carrying this—" He pressed your hands harder against his.

"Looking at yourself and seeing something lesser. Something diminished." His eyes burned up at you. "When I look at you I see the only thing in this world that has ever made me feel utterly incapable. Completely undone." A rough exhale. "You are the only thing that has ever had that power over me and you will never understand how completely I mean that."

You were breathing heavily. Both of them had their eyes only on you and the weight of it was doing things to you that had no place in a garden and every place in a bed. Your chest was tight and your face was hot and your hands were unsteady and you opened your mouth—

Voices.

All three of you straightened at once. Maekar was on his feet before you had drawn your next breath, and by the time the pair of guards rounded the corner you were all three standing at a respectable distance from one another like perfectly composed members of the royal family enjoying the evening air.

Or attempting to.

You were aware, that your eyes were red and your lips were parted and your chest was still rising and falling faster than it ought to be, and that both your husbands looked like men who had been in the middle of something they very much intended to finish.

Baelor's composure slightly frayed at the edges, Maekar's jaw set and his eyes still dark with everything he had not yet said. The picture the three of you made could be interpreted in a number of ways.

None of them entirely wrong.

The guards inclined their heads. The King was asking for both princes. Immediately, if it pleased them.

Neither of them looked pleased.

Baelor nodded once at the guards. Maekar said nothing, only held your gaze for one long charged moment that made the heat in your face travel considerably lower, and then turned and followed his brother.

You watched them go.

At the garden entrance Maekar stopped. Turned back. And with a short sharp gesture summoned the nearest Kingsguard and said something low that you could not hear. The guard nodded and posted himself at the entrance immediately, back straight, eyes forward.

For you. Without a word to you about it. Simply done.

You stood beneath the lemon trees in the warm gold light of the little glass suns, your children's painted dragons held carefully in both hands, and listened to your husbands' footsteps fade back toward the feast.

The garden settled into quiet.

You looked down at the paintings.

And Breathed.

The evening turned faster than you expected.

You did return to the hall later and somewhere between sitting down at the table and your second cup of wine the night shifted into something almost bearable.

Your sons noticed. Of course they noticed. They were their fathers' children and they had been watching you since you walked back through those doors and within minutes they had without discussion or instruction, rearranged themselves around you at the table.

Matarys on your left, talking across you to Daeron about something you did not follow but did not need to. Aerion on your right, loud, proud and gesturing too widely with his wine cup. Valarr had appeared from wherever Kiera had been keeping him, sliding into the seat across from you with a small smile that told you he knew exactly what he was doing and had decided to do it anyway.

Aemon and Aegon had simply wedged themselves in wherever there was space, elbows on the table, chins in their hands, completely unbothered by the decorum expected of princes at their grandsire's feast.

All six of them. Around you. Like they had agreed on it.

At some point during the evening you produced the two small paintnigs from the folds of your gown. You watched Aegon's face when he saw them and you pulled him toward you and kissed him on both cheeks and then his forehead and then his cheek again for good measure. He let you. Every single one.

Aemon submitted to one kiss and then pulled back with the expression of a boy who had a reputation to maintain, which made Aerion laugh so hard he spilled his wine.

You smiled more in that hour than you had in the entire evening before it.

When it ended, the room gradually emptied. You said your goodnights with warmth and kissed your sons, inclined your head to your goodfather the King and your goodmother who caught your eye and held it for just a moment with an expression that told you she saw more than she said, which was entirely characteristic of her.

You found a servant and gave quiet instructions.

The bathhouse sat apart from the main castle floors, connected by a short covered corridor that was mercifully empty at this hour. It was a small stone room, warm and low-lit, the water already heated by the smooth dark stones lining the basin, steam rising soft and slow in the candlelight.

You let the servant help you out of the gown and when you were down to nothing you told her to leave you.

She did.

You stood for a moment in the warm steam, in the candlelight, with no one's eyes on you.

Then you lowered yourself into the water slowly, let it rise around you, and closed your eyes.

You did not know how long you stayed like that. Long enough for the tension in your shoulders to begin to loosen.

Then footsteps. Two sets. Coming down the covered corridor.

You did not open your eyes. Did not say a word. Simply stayed where you were with your chin tipped back and your heart beating considerably faster than the warm water had any right to make it, and waited.

The door. The sound of fabric. A pause.

Then an almighty groan as Maekar lowered himself into the water on your left that was so deeply, startled a laugh out of you before you could stop it.

Baelor, settling in on your right, laughed too.

"Seven hells." Maekar's voice bounced off the stone walls. "Tell father next time he can kiss the arses of those lordlings himself."

"It is our duty," Baelor said mildly. "And his."

"Fuck duty sometimes."

A beat of silence.

"That," Baelor said, his voice dropping to something considerably lower, "I have to agree with. I would much rather be fucking something else entirely."

The heat that flooded your face had nothing to do with the water.

Maekar made a low sound of agreement that rumbled through the steam and settled somewhere in the base of your spine.

You opened your eyes.

Baelor was watching the candles, his expression unreadable but his eyes dark. And then Maekar's hand found the back of your neck, his thumb tracing slow along the line of your neck, following the bone of it.

Your breath caught.

Then Baelor moved.

He turned toward you in the water and stepped close, close enough that you felt him against your thighs, hard and hot and his hands found your hips beneath the surface and gripped them in a way that pulled a soft sound from somewhere in your throat that you had not given permission for.

His face was inches from yours, his mismatched eyes blown almost entirely black, the candlelight catching the water on his skin.

"More than twenty years ago," he said quietly, "you bewitched us." His thumbs traced slow circles against your hips. "The way you laugh. The way you move through a room. The way your eyes look when the sunlight catches them." His grip tightened, pulling you fractionally closer, the water shifting between you. "The way you tip your head back when the wind comes through your hair and you close your eyes and simply feel it." A pause. "There is no one. There has never been anyone. There will never be anyone."

Behind you Maekar's thumb moved from your neck to the shell of your ear, slow and deliberate, and you felt your eyes flutter.

"I remember," Baelor continued, his voice lower still, "very clearly after Aegon's birth. After you had recovered. The first night you undressed in front of us again." Something moved through his expression that was raw and entirely unmanaged. "The want I felt in that moment was beyond anything I had words for. Beyond anything I thought I was still capable of feeling after twenty years." His fingers traced upward from your hips, following the curve of you through the water. "If I could be selfish and I am telling you now that I want to be, deeply and thoroughly selfish, I would have you every moment of every day and still feel it was not enough."

His hand rose further, fingertips tracing the line of your throat, your jaw, his eyes following the path of them across your face like he was memorizing something he intended to keep.

"You have given this realm six sons," he said softly. "And the realm will remember only that. The realm will count you in heirs and duty and years of service and it will never once understand what it is actually looking at." His eyes met yours. "But we know. We have always known." His thumb traced your lower lip. "You are so much more than what you have given. So much more than what they see."

The water shifted as Maekar's hands found the underside of your thighs and gripped, pulling you back and settling you into his lap. The breath left your body. You felt him hard against you, felt the low rumble in his chest as he exhaled against your neck, and then his mouth found the skin beneath your ear and he sucked slowly, his tongue tracing the spot.

"Forgive us," Baelor said softly. "For ever making you feel otherwise."

You had no words. You had lost them somewhere between Maekar's hands on your thighs and his mouth on your neck and Baelor standing in the water before you close enough to feel the heat coming off him.

Baelor's eyes dropped.

The water sat just below your chest and your nipples peaked above the surface in the cool air of the bathhouse.

His eyes moved to Maekar.

Maekar, who was sucking a bruise into your neck with absolutely no apology for it, whose hands had spread wide and warm across your thighs beneath the water, holding you exactly where he wanted you. A soft sound left your mouth that you had no control over and then another as his teeth grazed the skin he had just marked.

Your head fell back against his shoulder.

"Please—" The word came out broken and breathless and wanting. "Please, I need—"

"We know," Maekar said against your neck. Low and rough and entirely sure of himself. "We know what you need."

Something passed between them over your shoulder, a look, brief and wordless and then Maekar's hands were on your hips and he lifted you out of the water without ceremony and set you down on the stone edge. No gentleness in it.

The stone was cool against the backs of your thighs.

He spread your legs and you felt the flush crawl from your face all the way down your chest and you opened your mouth to say something, anything and then—

Both mouths on you at once.

Baelor's tongue slow and precise, working you with that devastating patience of his, and Maekar's rougher, hungrier, no finesse in it whatsoever, just raw focused want.

Their mouths clashed against each other in the space between your thighs, neither yielding, both utterly consumed, and the sensation of it was so overwhelming that the sound that left you was nothing close to dignified.

Maekar pulled back just long enough to suck your inner thigh hard enough to mark it and then returned with even less restraint than before. Baelor's tongue moved in slow circles and then pressed flat and you nearly came off the stone edge entirely.

Your fingers tightened in Baelor's hair. Your other hand found Maekar's shoulder and gripped hard enough that he would feel it tomorrow and he made a low sound against you that vibrated through your entire body.

"Look at us." Maekar pulled back just enough to speak, his voice wrecked and rough. "Look down and look at us."

You looked down at them and the sight alone nearly undid you entirely.

Baelor's mouth on you was precise and devastating, his tongue pressing and curling and drawing out sounds from you that echoed off the stone walls, sucking everything you gave him like you were something to be savored. Your thighs shook around his shoulders.

You watched as he tenderly pressed his lips to the scar low on your mound and kissed it slowly, his eyes lifting to yours as he did it, holding your gaze, making sure you were watching, making sure you understood exactly what he was doing and why. Then his tongue, flat and warm, traced the length of it without hurry.

You made a sound that was half sob and half something else entirely.

And then he returned to your folds and you stopped being able to think about anything at all.

Maekar shouldered him aside.

Simply replaced him with that characteristic lack of patience and buried his face in you with a roughness that dragged a broken cry from your throat. Hungry, his hands locked around your hips pulling you against his mouth rather than going to meet you.

And then without warning, Maekar pulled back and grabbed Baelor by the jaw and kissed him hard, open and rough, a low groan coming from both of them as he licked the taste of you from his brother's mouth.

Baelor's hand fisted in Maekar's hair. The sound of it, the sight of it, pulled another wave of heat through you so sharply you whimpered.

They broke apart breathing hard, eyes dark, and turned to look at you at exactly the same moment.

Baelor reached for your ankles and pulled you back into the water between them and you went boneless, barely capable of standing. They pressed in from both sides, warm skin and hard bodies and hands everywhere at once and Baelor lowered his head and took your nipple into his mouth, kneading the weight of your breast in both hands while Maekar's mouth found your throat from behind, sucking and biting a path from your shoulder to your ear.

Your head fell back against Maekar's chest.

Your hands found his hair behind you and pulled and he groaned against your neck.

"Still think we do not want you," Maekar said roughly against your skin. Not a question. A statement, low and wrecked and burning. "Still think that."

You could not have formed a coherent answer if your life had depended on it.

Baelor in front, pulling you against him, his mouth finding yours in a deep kiss while his hands mapped every inch of your skin beneath the water without shame or hesitation.

And then Maekar pressed in from behind.

His hands gripped your hips and he slid inside you from behind slowly and the sound that left you was swallowed by Baelor's mouth. You grabbed at anything you could reach, one hand fisting in Baelor's hair, the other reaching back to grip Maekar's thigh behind you.

Maekar's pace built without mercy, his hands locked on your hips, the water churning around all three of you.

Baelor's hands cupped your breasts, his thumbs moving across your nipples slowly while Maekar drove into you from behind without restraint, and being pressed between them, held completely between their bodies, no space between you and either of them, was almost more than you could process.

Then Baelor lowered his lips to your ear, his voice dropping.

"Perhaps this time a daughter," he murmured. "I would not mind at all having you full with child again."

The sound that left you was shameless.

You felt Maekar shudder behind you, his grip tightening to the point of pain as he spent himself, his forehead dropping heavy against the back of your neck with a rough groan that rumbled through your entire body.

And then Baelor lifted you and pressed you back against the stone edge and slid inside you, deeper than Maekar's angle had allowed, and his pace was just as hard but slower, his mismatched eyes holding yours with an intensity that made it impossible to look away.

His hands gripped the curve of your ass, pulling you into every stroke.

Behind him Maekar watched, his dark eyes burning, and the sight of him watching you with Baelor sent you spiraling toward the edge faster than anything else could have.

Your thighs shook.

Your nails found Baelor's shoulders.

"I know," he breathed against your mouth. "Come for me."

It hit you like a wave breaking, white behind your eyes, your whole body shuddering between them, Baelor's and Maekar's name leaving your mouth as if you were praying a blessing. His grip on you was bruising and you did not care even slightly. Behind him Maekar's hand found your thigh and held it through the shaking like an anchor.

The white faded slowly.

The candlelight came back. The water. The warm stone at your back.

Baelor's forehead dropped against yours, both of you breathing hard and ragged, his chest heaving against you. His hands were still gripping your skin with an intensity that told you exactly what you would find on yourself tomorrow morning.

You did not mind it at all.

The heavy breathing eased slowly. Baelor pressed his lips to your forehead. Your cheek. The corner of your mouth. Small, soft things, entirely different from everything that had preceded them, and you felt tears prick unexpectedly at the gentleness of it.

Maekar's hand moved in slow steady strokes up your spine.

Nobody spoke.

The candles burned low around you and the water had gone still and the three of you simply breathed together in the quiet.

You looked at Baelor.

You took his face between both your hands and kissed him slowly and deeply and with everything you had not known how to say all evening. He kissed you back the same way, one hand covering yours against his cheek.

When you pulled back you were both quiet for a moment.

Then you turned and wobbled through the water toward Maekar, who had settled against the edge watching you both, and your feet slipped on the stone beneath and he caught you before you had even fully registered the fall, hands at your waist, steady and immediate, as though he had been expecting it.

"Graceful," he said.

"Hush."

The corner of his mouth moved.

You curled into him anyway, pressing your lips to his jaw, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. He exhaled slowly beneath your attention and his arms came around you and held you against his chest.

Baelor settled in beside you both, his shoulder warm against yours, and took your hand beneath the water and simply held it.

The three of you sat in the low candlelight and the still water and said nothing for a long moment.

"I love you," you said quietly.

Maekar's nose pressed into your hair.

Baelor's hand tightened around yours.

"And we love you," Baelor said softly. "Every part of you. Everything that you are and will be and you once was."

Maekar said nothing.

He just held you closer.

Later, back in your chambers, the candles burned down to nothing and your husbands were restless and entirely unwilling to let the night end, and you gave yourself over to them completely and without reservation and they took everything you gave and returned it threefold.

It was very late when it finally went quiet.

Dawn came in slowly through the high windows, pale and soft.

You were the first to surface from sleep, barely, just enough to be aware of the warmth on either side of you. Baelor's hand rested open against your stomach. Maekar had his face pressed into the curve of your neck, one arm thrown across you both, heavy and certain even in sleep, as though some part of him had decided even unconscious that he was not finished holding on.

You lay very still and looked at the pale dawn creeping across the ceiling and took a slow breath.

The uncertainties were still there. The ugly, shapeless insecurities that had swallowed you whole. You were not foolish enough to think one night had erased them entirely. It did not work that way.

But here, in the early quiet, tangled in warm sheets between two men who had given you their souls without condition or hesitation, the uncertainties were very small, nearly insignificant.

Smaller than Baelor's hand resting against your stomach.

Smaller than the sound of Maekar breathing slow and deep against your neck, holding you flush against him.

Smaller, than two little painted dragons hanging in a lemon tree. Drawn by small hands that loved you without condition or any awareness of the cost of what you had given to deserve them.

You exhaled slowly.

And closed your eyes.

For now you let yourself simply be held.

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